Tag Archives: education

Tom Friedman, Pulitzer prize winning New York Times columnist, predicts that “college education is headed for a huge disruption”.

Tom Friedman

According to Friedman, “High wage/middle skill jobs are disappearing”, leaving a different employment landscape. Graduates “won’t need to find a job. They’ll need to invent a job.” He claims that “Bosses look for people who are relentlessly entrepreneurial.” Employers don’t care what you know; “they will pay you only for what you can do with what you know.”

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I’ve found a new fave site with dozens of short, funny, yet educational video clips. It’s about mathematics and is called numberphile.com. It’s produced in the U.K..

The videos are less than ten minutes long. Most of the presenters are college professors. Wait! Wait! Don’t hold that against them! These guys are informal and Brady Haran masterfully edits and produces them with simple graphics so that they’re fun and easy to follow.

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I watched a recent Academic Challenge competition on Palm Beach County’s education channel. Teams of 6 students from Palm Beach high schools were simultaneously presented with academic questions by a quizmaster. The first team to answer correctly scores a point. The questions were challenging! The better teams beat me every time on the math questions; I had better luck with the other questions, but still my score was pathetic.

Just based on this tiny sampling, I hold great hope for the future. These kids knew their stuff!

I gather that within each county only the team from the winning school advances to the finals at Disney World. I have no idea why neither Broward nor Dade County schools participated. (The Dade school board worries about providing native language instruction in dozens of languages — a waste of resources. Most of the Broward school board is usually under indictment for accepting bribes from contractors. I guess that they’re busy.)

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The proliferation of Internet access has encouraged the growth of LMS (Learning Management Systems) over the last decade and competition is hotter than ever. Why? LMS can provide a walled garden for students to learn. Many LMS vendors have priced their LMS products cleverly: they’re available gratis for a single classroom, but require substantial payment when deployed throughout a school district. The profit motive is alive and well in the LMS market.

Today’s LMS leaders are

Edmodo

Schoology

Haiku

Moodle

Blackboard

Canvas

In my neighborhood, the Palm Beach County school district has committed to Edmodo.

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“People can’t stop you from believing in your own dreams.” Those words were spoken by 9 year-old Kaylie at the end of the powerful PBS Frontline documentary, Poor Kids. Because her mother is poor, Kaylie is moved from one improvised shelter to another, missing school, so Kaylie’s education is a mess. She tells us that she’ll need an education to escape poverty. All of the kids are malnourished.

There is no voice-over narration. All the kids speak candidly and their words are haunting. You can view the entire documentary at Poor Kids.

1 of 5 kids in the U.S. lives in poverty. Disgraceful.

Update, January 2016: Read the comments to this video. You’ll find not only empathy, but wisdom borne of suffering and overcoming impoverished childhoods. Some amazing stories.

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Do you hunger for a cheap computer for learning programming? How does 25 dollars sound? Do you want a tiny computer that you can use to browse the web? It’s yours for 35 dollars.

A group from Cambridge University has designed and developed a credit-card size computer that can run Linux on an Arm processor. Their Raspberry Pi computer targets the student and low-income family markets, but has industrial controller applications as well.

The $35 version of the tiny computer includes 512 MB RAM, 2 USB ports, 100baseT ethernet adapter, and HDMI video output. Its sales numbers have been huge since it began shipping in February.

While in charge of undergraduate admissions to the computer science program at Cambridge, Eben Upton (pictured) first envisioned what eventually became Raspberry Pi. He and five colleagues founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation as a UK-based charity whose goal is to promote computer science study in schools. Eben now works at chip manufacturer Broadcom, who produce Raspberry Pi’s “computer on a chip”.

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University of the People (UoPeople) sounds like a terrific idea: use the Internet to provide university level education and ultimately American Associates and Bachelors degrees to anyone around the globe (who can access the worldwide web).

The faculty consists of retired university professors. So far, they’ve provided the teaching gratis. They expect that soon they’ll charge $100 per class test. UoPeople was founded by Shai Reshef and occupies small offices in Pasadena, California.

UoPeople is part of what Stanford’s president called “a tsunami” that’s about to crash into the American education system. Academia created the tsunami by allowing education costs to spiral out of control. There are two segments of the American economy whose costs are insane: education and healthcare.

Michelle Rhee, on NBC-TV’s Meet The Press program today showed a hilarious Olympics-themed 30-second ad for her StudentsFirst (“a movement to transform public education”) organization. StudentsFirst advocates education reform, including the ending of teacher tenure.

I had no idea who Ms. Rhee was, before today. Thanks to Google, I learned that she was chancellor of Washington DC’s school system from 2007 to 2010. According to her entry in Wikipedia,

Rhee inherited a troubled system; there had been six school chiefs in the previous 10 years, students historically had below-average scores on standardized tests, and according to Rhee, only 8% of eighth graders were at grade level in mathematics. The D.C. schools were performing poorly despite having the advantage of the third highest spending per student in the US.

That last sentence confirms my contention that just throwing money at our broken education system won’t fix it. As a nation, we spend more money per student than any other country — and on math and science tests, our students score lower than most of them.

I’m very excited to see that the Internet may allow us to unlock the doors to education. Salman Khan’s Khan Academy took a giant step forward, and now some prestigious universities are following. It’s just in time, because the cost of higher education is out of control. Why?

There is a fundamental disconnect happening between the providers of education and the consumers of education. If you ask universities what they are charging the $60,000 for, they’ll say, “Look at our research facilities. Look at our faculty. Look at the labs and everything else.” And then if you ask the parents and the students why they are taking on $60,000 of debt, they’ll say, “Well, I need the credential. I need a job.”

So one party thinks they’re selling a very kind of an enriching experience, and the other one thinks that they’re buying a credential. And if you ask the universities what percentages of your costs are “credentialing,” they say oh, maybe 5% to 10%. And so I think there’s an opportunity if we could decouple those things—if the credentialing part could happen for significantly less.

John Hennessy, president of Stanford University, replied:

We put some of this stuff online and then all of a sudden we got 100,000 students around the world signed up. We’ve learned a bunch of things. One of the phenomenal things we saw in our experiment was how quickly the community would answer questions when students in the class posed them. What I told my colleagues is there’s a tsunami coming. I can’t tell you exactly how it’s going to break, but my goal is to try to surf it, not to just stand there.

Now Stanford’s on-line experiment (initiated by Google’s Sebastian Thrun, not Sanford’s administration) is joined by some heavy hitters:

In May, Harvard and MIT announced edX, slated to offer full-blown online courses this Fall, apparently at no cost. In the announcement of edX, its president claims “This is the biggest change in education since the invention of the printing press”. Credentials? “Certificates of mastery will be available for those who are motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.”

Coursera, partnering with Stanford, the University of Michigan, Princeton, and University of Pennsylvania, will offer courses at no cost, but will charge money for still undefined additional services. (Do these include accredited degrees? I have no idea.).

Udacity has grown out of Stanford and is beginning to offer free online courses. It’s headed by Sebastian Thrun (who led Google’s driverless car project). In a Wall Street Journal interview, Mr. Thrun says “The dialogue always focuses on what’s going to happen to the institutions. I’m totally siding with the students.”

Do you remember the effect that email had on hierarchies? It flattened them. Maybe e-education will have the same effect. Victor Hugo (1802-1885) said it best: “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

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“It’s ludicrous to think that multiplication in Alabama and multiplication in New York are really different.” – Bill Gates

The Wall Street Journal published an article titled Was the $5 Billion Worth It?, about the Gates Foundation’s efforts to improve education in the United States. Five billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the billions of tax dollars that are wasted on our fundamentally flawed education system(s) each year.

I’m happy to see that Mr. Gates agrees that the idea of locally-controlled curricula is stupid. I ragged about this a few months ago (It’s time to rationalize school curricula). One national curriculum for all is the way to go. Bill puts it simply, “This is like having a common electrical system. It just makes sense to me.”

Then, what exactly does the U.S. Department of Education do, other than extend the layer of self-appointed government employees, whose benefits far exceed those of private-sector workers who pay for their salaries, benefits, and insanely generous pensions?

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The founders of Netflix, Web-based training company, and author of In the (Google-)Plex . . . all interviewed.

Yes, I’m shilling for Charlie Rose again.

1. Reed Hastings founded Netflix in 1997 and is its CEO. He reports that Netflix continues to move away from mail delivery of plastic DVD discs to on-demand streaming of video via the Internet. They’re also slowly moving toward content production — not just delivery. He reports that they have 23.4 million subscribers, and a 70 percent growth rate(!).

Mr. Hastings claims that Microsoft’s Windows 7 is wonderful, and is now the best selling operating system ever. I take this with a large grain of salt, since he sits on Microsoft’s board of directors, and many of those copies that filled up channel pipelines aren’t actually being used.

2. Salman Khan is focusing on providing web-based training. Until now, he’s working outside traditional academia, but wants his Khan Academy training courses to gain the same standing as more traditional teaching methods. I liked what he had to say and think that he’s moving in the right direction regarding the need for easy to understand instruction even for complex subjects. (See my recent article, It’s time to rationalize school curricula.) Bill Gates told Parade Magazine that he uses Khan Academy when he homeschools his own children.

3. Steven Levy seems like an old friend. (I’ve never met him; I’ve just read his books and articles.) His 1980s book, Hackers, is a classic. His most recent book, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives is about Google. This is a broad subject: Google’s annual revenue is 30 billion dollars — all from advertising(!). He reports that Larry Page’s recent return to the CEO position is intended to continue innovation. Google continues to allow its employees to use 20 percent of their time (one day per week) to pursue subjects that interest them — not necessarily Google. Larry and Sergey are both products of Montessori schooling, which encourages original thought — and according to Mr. Levy they both prize creativity within Google. The job ahead for Larry Page is to keep Google agile and innovative, even though it’s now a huge company.

Charlie asked Mr. Levy about Google’s ambivalent relationship with China, and its policies regarding user privacy: this is fascinating.

Obviously, throwing more money at school boards isn’t the answer. Something is fundamentally wrong with the American public school system. In Broward County, the school board vacuums up more tax revenue than any other government entity and wastes millions on corruption and mis-management. I’ve lost track of how many school board members are under indictment for accepting bribes from contractors and which federal agency is investigating them.

My sad experience jumping from one school system to another

I have something of an axe to grind on this topic. My family moved constantly when I was in school: from 4th grade until 10th grade, I never completed the school year in the same school in which I had begun the school year. Some of these moves were within the same school district, and some were across state lines. The moves between states were the hardest for my schooling: each move meant totally different teachers, curriculum, texts, etc. After the third or fourth move, I was completely lost. I was always the new kid in school. I fell from being one of the best students in my 4th grade class to being one of the worst in my 10th grade class. By that time, I had become interested in (obsessed with might be a better description) electronics and amateur radio, and since school was such a mess, I treated it like a nuisance. This is not a formula for success.

In any country other than the United States and Canada, a kid could move from province to province with little disruption of his/her education, since most countries follow one national curriculum.

If schools across the country followed the same curriculum, these moves would probably have been much easier for me. At least the texts and curricula would have been consistent, so I’d have had a prayer of keeping up with the coursework. Today, families are more mobile than ever: parents who care about their kids’ education would want to provide as much educational continuity as possible when they’re forced to move.

I understand the desire to keep school curricula under local control, as they’ve always been in the United States. But what we’re doing isn’t working. Look at these poor showings of American students compared to students in other countries. It’s scandalous: in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades our kids score toward the bottom in math and science when compared to other countries’ students . . . and we’re spending more money!

This makes no sense. Who’s to blame? Teachers unions? Maybe. Petty politicians who control local school boards? Possibly. Bloated administrations? Probably. I found a report that claims that GW Bush’s No Child Left Behind program resulted in states’ lowering standards. Yikes!

There is hope.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, which is partially supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, seems to be our best hope. I’m pleased to see that most states have adopted this initiative and have agreed to implement it by 2015. Maybe some of the cash that we all spend on Microsoft products will bail us out, rather than just pay for more insourcing via H-1B visas (of which Bill Gates has been fond). That would be ironic!

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Japan to emphasize English fluency. (Why doesn’t America?)

I heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered about Japan’s increasing emphasis on the use of the English language by its corporations and citizens. The Japanese government acknowledges that English is the world’s language for commerce and technology. They have mandated that by 2013, all high school English classes will be taught not in Japanese, but in English.

Why don’t we resolve to teach only in English in the United States? We’ve been wasting money for decades: in Dade County, Florida, the school board requires that if there are at least 3 students who speak another language, the county must provide classes for them in their native language. This is nonsense. If you expect to thrive in the United States, you must learn English. (I recently ranted about Spanish language broadcasting within the United States. Teaching in anything but English is a similar waste of resources and actually harms the students.)

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Gordon Welchman was an Englishman who, while working on decoding German messages at Bletchley Park during World War II, invented traffic analysis. His idea was that even if one couldn’t decipher message contents, just tabulating who messaged whom, when, and how frequently, lent knowledge about the enemy.

After the war, he emigrated to America, where he became an American citizen and taught the first computer course at M.I.T. He worked for Remington Rand and eventually for the MITRE Corporation, where he enhanced traffic analysis technology and helped develop C3 (Command, Control, and Communication) systems.

Following the publication of his book The Hut Six Story in 1982, which detailed the work of his Hut Six group at Bletchley Park, his security clearance was revoked. This killed his career in intelligence.

Well, both snowboarding and skiing. Reminds me of water skiing. The middle east coast states received buckets of snow this weekend and these New Yorkers made the best of it. Yes, that looks like Broadway in Times Square.

“It re-writes the history of technology.”

I love this parody. It’s a humorous advertisement for your own mail server:

Do you run a government agency but hate complying with the law? Then you need DC Matic, the Hillary Clinton-approved email server!

credit: Written and performed by Remy. Video directed and edited by Meredith Bragg

What’s Hillary hiding? Classified emails? Sure. Evidence of her negligence in Benghazi that led to the murders of US citizens? Of course. Security breaches via assistant Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections? Probably. No, the ticking time bomb in this server is bribery. Maybe treason as well. She’s hiding written evidence of her deals that traded State Department help in exchange for large donations to the Clinton Foundation and large fees for speaking engagements by Bill Clinton.

Both Swope and Obama were elected to office by fools who suffer from chronic white guilt.

In 1969, Putney Swope announced:

The changes I’m gonna make will be minimal. I’m not gonna rock the boat. Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. What you do is sink the boat.

In 2008, Barack Obama bragged:

. . . we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Mr. Obama is trying to transform America, alright. Transform it from a prosperous capitalist economy governed by a constitutional republic to a bankrupt socialist economy governed by a corrupt tyrannical dictatorship. Barack is following Putney’s credo, “What you do is sink the boat.”

The tune, “Slow Down”, is performed on piano and sung by its composer, Larry Williams. He was from New Orleans (of course). The tune, ringing with ninth chords, was released on disc in 1958. I think that the dancers are from a 1950s Hollywood rock & roll movie. Larry also composed Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Bad Boy, and Bony Moronie — classic rock tunes, all. He was born in 1935 and died on this date, January 7, in 1980.

In the mid-1950s, Williams inherited star billing from Little Richard (who’d forsaken rock and roll for religion) at New Orleans’ record label Specialty Records.

While Williams was alive, the Beatles paid their respects by admirably covering Larry’s Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, and Bad Boy. I’m amazed that Larry Williams isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Extra credit assignment: Compare and contrast the Beatles’ cover of Slow Down with Larry Williams’ original. This clip includes the fab four wailing in Liverpool’s Cavern Club: (If YouTube has taken down this video clip, you can hear the same recording with groovy rock and roll clips (sorry — requires Flash) from 1950s America and early Beatles. Sorry for the Flash format.)

I’m delighted to discover that the video of Joni Mitchell’s classic Shadows and Light concert (1980) can be viewed in full (1h 13m) on YouTube. Supporting players are Jaco Pastorius on bass, Pat Metheny on guitar, Michael Brecker on sax, Don Alias on drums, Lyle Mays on keyboards, and The Persuasions. It’s among my favorite videos of a concert performance.

Jaco Pastorius

Jaco was a Fort Lauderdale kid who began playing in rock bands around town in a variety of clubs: She, The 4 O’Clock CLub, The Village Zoo, The Flying Machine, The Button, Bachelors III, Ocean Mist . . . When I first heard Jaco in the early 1970s, he was playing bass for straight-ahead local rock bands. He graduated to more jazz- and fusion- related music and put his unique fretless Fender bass stamp on Weather Report. I’ve heard bass players tell me that they tried to imitate Jaco’s technique, but gave up trying; they claim that Jaco changed what it meant to play electric bass guitar. Jaco’s friend Pat Metheny, who plays a beautiful lead guitar in this concert, is a University of Miami music school graduate.

Jaco seemed to still have his act together when he played this concert. Wikipedia has a good Jaco biography. He had a rapid rise to the top followed by a quick ride back down again. I had musician friends c 1984-87 who were torn up watching their friend Jaco dismantle his life. This Warner Brothers recording artist and Down Beat Hall of Fame member was sleeping on park benches and shooting baskets in a local public park.

Michael Brecker and Don Alias died a few years ago.

This is a classic performance by master musicians who were at the top of their games. Too bad it couldn’t last forever.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the FCC is considering disciplining NBC for airing an indecent performance on July 6, Miley Cyrus’ “Bangerz Tour”. I watched it. It was provocative, but artful. Bertolt Brecht would have loved the production: live dancers against rear-projection oversized animation with creative costumes and lighting. I loved it. Some of the images, such as Miley riding a giant “Mr. Wiener”, were sexually suggestive.

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

The concert (recorded in Barcelona) reminded me of Madonna’s shows twenty-five years ago. Both performers have acceptable contralto voices, energetic dance skills, and assemble exciting Brechtian spectacles. I love the costuming and choreopgraphy. Shocking? “Bangerz” pushed the limits on prime-time American TV, I suppose. But that week on television, the atrocious performance by the Brazilian football team was truly shocking.

I’d prefer that the FCC take no action on this. They have enough serious issues on their plate already. Censoring art is, in my opinion, a slippery slope for any government agency . . . and I think that this production can be labeled “art”. Here’s the full show (862MB H264 1h 25m mp4 video file, 720 x 404 pixel) for download or streaming:

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

You’ll need a fast Internet connection to smoothly stream this. You might be better to download the file and then play it locally with a good video player such as VLC.

Is it Miley’s performance or just modern low distortion recording technique that for the first time makes John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” lyrics (at 44m 35s) sound so . . . so . . . clear, logical, and complete?

I’ve worked with integrated circuits (I.C.s) since the 1960s, but haven’t been involved in their manufacture — only their application.

Intel Haswell wafer with a pin for scalephoto: Intel Free PressToday’s integrated circuit manufacture is a high stakes capital intensive business whose players use trade secrets to maintain their market advantage. I’ve never been inside an I.C. “fab” (factory), so it was a treat to find an hour-long presentation by an industry manufacturing engineer on YouTube. The technologies used at nano dimensions are mind-boggling.

Here’s the excellent presentation, in full:

The speaker mentions that lithographic imaging of the mask is now being done at 193 nanometer (nm). As you can see, we’re well above visible light and on our way to x-rays(!). Here’s the electromagnetic spectrum in that region:

Click for full-sizegraphic by: Shigeru23
The presentation is aimed at the layperson and is filled with surprises. For instance, one gigabyte of semiconductor memory can be produced on a flat substrate within the diameter of a human hair. I give it two (gloved) thumbs up.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs

I’m the one that’s gonna have to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to. — Jimi Hendrix

I just listened to an excellent interview with Walt Mossberg, who since 1991 wrote a weekly computer industry column for the Wall Street Journal. Walt’s now retired. Leo Laporte, an industry podcaster, coaxes some great stories from Mr. Mossberg.

Walt’s perspective was always that of a user — not a tech freak. Most industry reporters are techies who don’t appreciate that most of us don’t care about the inner workings and secret mechanisms of computers.

Walt speaks a bit about his long relationships with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. (Walt sat in the passenger seat as Gates, frustrated by traffic, drove his Lexus for miles on the road’s shoulder.)

In the 1970s and early 1980s, I loved ABBA’s music. I was pleased to discover this recent critique, in both spoken and written form. I didn’t realize that ABBA were considered politically incorrect in their home country.

Intelligent Life magazine‘s Matthew Sweet observes that ABBA’s songs progressed from naiveté through sophistication to melancholy. As Matthew says, “Many of their songs are about accepting the failure of relationships”.

Here’s the companion article, Thank You for the Music, by Matthew Sweet, from a recent issue of Intelligent Life. Both the article and the audio clip stem from his visit to Stockholm’s ABBA Museum.

These observations will help you get the most from your swimming. (They’re from Australian podcast Effortless Swimming). Each is a short audio clip of less than ten minutes. (The first truth is that one or two swim workouts a week won’t cut it.)

Now that not just one, but two movies (Breaking The Code and The Imitation Game) have been produced about Alan Turing, it’s time we had a movie about Ada Lovelace. She seems to have possessed an unusual combination of precise reasoning and imagination, strong will, and feminine charm. Plus, she was in the middle of a tug o war between her feuding parents, poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella.

Why is Ada important? She’s acknowledged to be the first computer programmer (c 1840!). Like Mozart and Turing, her life was tragically cut short at a young age. I propose this biopic today because it’s Ada Lovelace Day!

If you’re using Windows 7 or 8.1, and you’re sick of being nagged by Microsoft’s pop-up to upgrade to Windows 10, go to the Ultimate Outsider website and download and install their GWX Control Panel. It’s received rave reviews. Cost: gratis. Here’s the full description.

New and Improved Method

Update, April 3, 2016: Steve Gibson, founder of GRC (Gibson Research Corp), has written a great little freeware utility that also blocks upgrades to Windows 10. Steve writes most of his code in assembler, so his utilities are tiny. He calls this newest utility Never10. He’s created a page dedicated to Never10, where you may download it for free. It’s only 81 kilobyes in size and doesn’t require installation on your Windows PC. You need just run it once to turn off upgrades to Windows 10, and run it again to allow upgrades to Windows 10. Short and sweet, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Installing two or more application programs on a PC can chew up your time as you wade through web pages, download prompts that don’t always work, and questions and answers. Now ninite.com (http://ninite.com/) does this tedious work for you. I’ve tried it on a few PCs and it’s worked flawlessly. Install everything in one easy step on your brand-new Windows 7 PC!